The Tao of Ted Lasso: Life, Leadership and the Art of Getting Along (Part 1)

Part 1 - Ted Lasso? Really?

Last September the comedy series Ted Lasso won 7 Emmys, including four major awards, out of 20 nominations. I'd seen the ads but not paid much attention. TV comedy isn't one of my go-to genres and quite frankly the title sounded ridiculous.

It took the series ‘Foundation’ to get me to subscribe to Apple TV+ and news of the awards to get me to watch a single episode and then promptly binged the entire two seasons.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what makes it such exceptional entertainment, I'm no critic, but as a marketing guy and self-professed student of human nature I was intrigued by the sheer number of articles published examining the leadership style and interpersonal skills exhibited by the title character.

Google “be like Ted Lasso” or “the philosophy of Ted Lasso” and you’ll get a wealth of content from the likes of Vanity Fair (Bring Ted Lasso Energy Into Your Life!) and The Guardian (The secret of happiness? Be more like Ted Lasso), as well as innumerable blog posts.?

To understand why something works it helps to explore the context. History reflects that successful shows tap into the zeitgeist of the era. Look at long-running programs like 'Gunsmoke' and 'Seinfeld' in the pre/early-cable era to get the pulse of the culture then.

More recently 'The Wire' and 'Breaking Bad' are often cited as two of the best programs of all time and credited with making the anti-hero a thing. Normal people, trying to get by, doing morally and legally questionable things they never would have imagined doing at an earlier stage in life, but were compelled to.

Not many shows can pull this off without either getting self-righteous or becoming tedious from predictable peaks and valleys. One such example that comes to mind is ‘This is Us’ which my wife discovered during lockdown.

The plot is built around a web of familial relationships spanning nearly every imaginable affinity group. Creative storytelling. Superb cast. Largest collection of genius-level EQ characters I’ve seen in a single family. The antithesis of ‘Succession’.?

My wife loves it and you wish more people interacted the way the main characters do, especially the father whom I believe should serve as a role model for every male parent. Yet you don’t come across nearly as many articles exploring the interpersonal skills exhibited by the main characters as you do with Ted Lasso.

I forced myself to keep watching, seeing it as an opportunity to better myself from the examples set by the lead characters, and eventually made it to Episode 6 but it just didn't work for me. It was too extreme. Each episode felt like a blow to the head. Too much of a sermon (not that there's anything wrong with that, to borrow from ‘Seinfeld’). ‘The Brady Bunch’ of our era and not in a good way. And this is where Ted Lasso differs.

Ted Lasso succeeds in part due to its deft touch and just plain old goodness. Yet it doesn’t proselytize nor is it so sugary sweet as to be unpalatable. Ted is neither hero nor anti-hero. He hasn't gone to the dark side. He's not surrounded by Kramer-like cartoon characters. He’s a successful college football coach who exists in the same world we do, faces the same interpersonal challenges we do, and is surrounded by people we might even recognize from our lives, TV or YouTube.?

Yes, it's a fantasy but it is close enough to reality that someone even mildly self aware can’t help but ask “yeah, but why not?” Check out the Season 2 Christmas episode ‘Carol of the Bells’ to see what I'm talking about. You want to believe. Thus the growing amount of be-like-Ted digital ink.

The show debuted during what was arguably one of the most divisive presidencies in a generation. To be sure there were others far worse. A few that immediately come to mind are the presidencies spanning the Vietnam War/Civil Rights Movement, WWI and the Civil War eras.?

It also aired during one of the most deadly global pandemics in 100 years.?

Throw in unregulated and destabilizing social networks driven by powerful rapidly evolving AI/ML technology that both serves as a catalyst and feeds upon itself, a little like algorithmic machine trading in the financial markets but without any of the safety measures, and you get a sense for the unease. The way society must have felt during the Cuban missile crisis.?

The show’s audience is a politically bi-furcated nation experiencing a growing awareness of persistent and widening social and economic inequality, a shrinking middle class, a growing distrust of business and government, and that almost universally feels unappreciated. It's telling that sales of both firearms and used luxury vehicles are through the roof.

Season 3 of Ted Lasso will soon air to a population that is now also experiencing the economic repercussions of an unprovoked war by Russia on a weak neighbor that has all the marking of a 1930s sociopathic nationalist's desire to reacquire a portion of the Sudetenland occupied by a defenseless Czechoslovakia. That vanity eventually led to a world war where an estimated 70–85 million people perished; about 3% of the world’s 1940 population.

But enough of context. To paraphrase Commissioner Gordon in ‘The Dark Night’ Ted Lasso isn't the comedy we deserve, it’s the comedy we need.

The concept for Ted Lasso sprang from a couple of NBC Sports shorts promoting broadcasts of Premier League matches that I highly recommend you watch. Who'da thunk right? I didn’t invest in Starbucks or Amazon either.

I tell my children that half of success in anything is luck. The other half consists mostly of intelligence, which is inherited, and persistence which really is the only thing we as individuals can control. Apparently the creators shopped the concept everywhere before they found a believer, which is a lesson often told in the business and technology worlds by those that succeeded and that also serves as an early example of one of many leadership principles in the very DNA of Ted Lasso.?

Next Time: Part 2 The Tao and Ted Lasso